When Skyrim’s Dawnguard DLC was announced, we were worried it might end up just being a pair of equippable contact lenses. A new prE3 trailer shows that it’s actually some manner of major expansion with attempts to blot out the sun being made and all sorts. What seems clear is that players will be faced with a choice; do you wish to live in a graveyard and eat people, all supernatural-like, or would you rather have a pair of equippable contact lenses? See for yourself.

There’s a bit of mounted combat in there and all sorts else, including an actual mention of The Elder Scrolls. It’s all quite exciting but one thing’s for certain, it will almost definitely not be better with Kinect. Imagine pretending to mount a horse while being watched by a magical camera on top of your television. Obscene.

Big thuddy dramatic fantasy trailer music is fine as well, but who wishes they’d gone for this?

We don’t have a date or price for PC yet but shall hopefully know more soon.

Yeah Skyrim is such a mediocre game, with its dated visuals.
I can’t enjoy exploring because I’m staring at my character’s hip bones at all times to make sure they move as a proper 2011 game would require.
I spend the rest of the time staring at rocks and logs and complaining aloud about the texture quality.
I’m a true gamer you see.

It is a mediocre game because it doesn’t have anything else. The world is nice and broad, sure, but the depth is shallow. Or am I just getting too old? I don’t know, but I remember enjoying other RPGs’ worlds more. I played Skyrim for about 30 hours and I have this feeling that I’ve seen it all. Yes, there’s these occasional one-time situations that make you smile for a moment, but it all seems so damn shallow. Just another dungeon with not much backstory to it, just another dragon fight, just another ruin with nothing interesting in it. Broad, but shallow.

That said, try Skyrim with ENB wrappers. It makes it look like a proper 2012 game like it was supposed to.

It was supposed to look like a ‘proper 2012′ game, even though it came out in 2011? Are the devs supposed to be f*cking prophetic? And what does a ‘proper 2012′ game look like? What are the visual features of a ‘proper 2012′ game? What would differentiate a ‘proper 2012′ game from, say, a 2011 game? Do all games released this year have to look like ‘proper 2012′ games?

To break it down – yes, the problem is in you. Skyrim is more or less a sandbox experience. To take your example – all the dungeons have a story. The story of some is a bit more obvious, either told through a quest or a book you find hidden somewhere. Others tell stories themselves and you piece them together with your imagination. But judging from your comment it seems you aren’t really interested in that sort of thing and would much rather be spoon-fed while basking in the bright light of shiny shaders so that the 2011 game looks like a “proper 2012″ title.

I am not that old, but I remember times when gamers were complaining how nobody cared about gameplay and it was all graphics. Now, reading comments like yours, I can’t help but wonder what song you sang back then.

Glad someone besides me understands that. The dungeons in Skyrim are all very deliberately designed, there is a definite story to all of them, and as you said, some of those stories are more obvious than others.

Also there definitely seems to be a resurgence in the “graphics > everything” mentality for some reason. I would argue that technical graphics are less important than art direction. However, in Skyrim’s case, the graphical fidelity is supposed to enhance the realism and immersion in the world, which is critical to the game’s experience.

@ Brun That’s always been a huge part of the TES experience. You can’t make a game this big while paying attention that every single little thing is explained, it’s just not possible. The TES games are just the closest things you can get to a table-top RPG. They throw you in this big world and let you do whatever you want, but if you are not ready to use your imagination to fill the void and role-play a little, go play something else.

The dungeons in Skyrim are indeed masterfully crafted and a huge step-up from the a lot more generic ones in Oblivion and the one-room basements of Morrowind. But if you don’t want to look for a story in them, the game will likely not spoon-feed you one just because you are lazy. I honestly miss the times when I had to use my imagination when playing games and Skyrim at the very least reminded me of ages past.

And I still don’t see what was so wrong with the graphics in Skyrim. Yes, the textures could have been a bit more detailed, big deal, the amazing art more than makes up for it. I don’t get and I never will get people who put graphics above everything. I want to play games, not tech demos.

I agree, as with all sandbox games it’s an endless rinse and repeat mechanic that keeps it going, the same quest more or less do a thousand times with slight variation, the only interesting part is the Main Quest which has scripted events etc and really could be taken out of the sandbox game and turned into a shorter more focused game itself. One day sandbox will actually live up to the hype. At the moment I’d rather have a well made and good length linear game. I idid play hours of Skyrim mainly doing side quests (I did alot!) and eventually got really bored so never even bothered carrying on to do more of the main quest. Going into supposedly cities where say 15 people live feels odd to me. As I said oneday sandbox\open world will really be something however where years away I reckon before that happens.

The rinse and repeat argument could be used for almost every game ever made. To me, and that’s an answer to the next comment as well, it’ a lot more immersion breaking not to be able to jump over a fucking fence because the designer didn’t put anything on the other side than animations not being as good as in Battlefield 3. Like I said, if you don’t want to use your imagination, that’s your choice, but don’t call Skyrim a bad game fo it.

And yes, I have always found it a bit irritating that you can join every faction in a single playthrough. That has hardly stopped me from enjoying the game though. When your only 2 arguments are this and not-so-good animations it becomes pretty apparent you are simply looking for reasons not to like the game.

In my eyes Skyrim IS a great game by any stretch. Certainly better than Oblivion and maybe it even surpasses Morrowind.

As with all sandbox games, Skyrim is as fun as the player is willing to make it. Getting the most out of a sandbox game like Skryim takes a level of mental investment that is somewhat above that of other games. By that I mean that playing Skyrim – or any sandbox game – should be approached like you would going out into your backyard and pretending you’re a knight or an astronaut or something. You create a backstory for yourself, play to that story, etc. The reason that Skyrim is so appealing as a sandbox game is that it gives you one hell of a backyard to play in.

Ah, so the publishers who turn down pitches for classic CRPGs because they do not look like the newest FPSs are not being out of touch with what gamers want, they are just listening to the wrong gamers, like you.

I sort of agree with Enterprise. Planescape: Torment (which I’m currently playing) can afford to be ugly. So can The Longest Journey and Morrowind. That’s because these games are classics. Skyrim is not a classic by any measure. Skyrim is like Crysis 2 and Mass Effect: They are good, but if there’s anything else around to hold my attention then I’ll wait for a sale.

Yes, because the crappy animations in NO WAY detract from the otherwise excellent visuals. No painful suspension-of-disbelief disconnect at all. Never have I gone “Wow, the mountains look great, the trees are awesome, the environment is pulling me in OH GOD I’M RUNNING LIKE A GIMP AGAIN.”

Because I’m a real gamer. Or something.

Actually, the game is mediocre because of the half-arsed story lines and the lack of real and well-though-out consequences for your actions. Being the head of all the guilds, even when they’re opposed to each other is not at all immersion breaking. The terrible animation is just a middle finger from the developers.

It’s a fun game, but it’s not a great game by any stretch of the imagination.

Oh, someone in here not from the mighty Bethesda Defence Forces. I can agree with all of this.

I mentioned graphics because better graphics means better experience.
In reply to someone who asked how a 2012 game is supposed to look like: http://tinyurl.com/cw69rbl or this: http://tinyurl.com/bsb38af . Seen here is Skyrim with a few kilobytes of postprocessing done on its top layer.

What I wanted from Skyrim is at least a few things Witcher 2 delivered and things it could not deliver due to CDPR being a small studio. In a very general sense – things that push the boundaries of RPGs and games in general. Complex story, top notch technical stuff, DEPTH. Skyrim’s entire campaign was a complete disappointment for me, and so was the world after spending some thirty hours in it. I’ve seen the dungeons, fought the bandits, done the most entertaining of quests, and then I hit the bottom, and looking back to the hours I had played, I saw nothing worth of remembering five years from now.

Customized Skyrim ENB series wrappers, found on Skyrim Nexus or on EBN series forums. I like this one the most, done by Midhras: http://www.mediafire.com/?72zu2v07hqceugh
I can’t say what other mods were used as I did not take those shots, but googling should do.
Neither can I say about ENB series’ compatibility with Steam versions, but there shouldn’t be a problem I guess, except that you won’t get them on Workshop and will have to install manually.

It looks like The Witcher 2 with argonian heads pasted on to it. I have never seen that kind of armor outside The Witcher 2, except sort of at museums. The last, in particular, is definitely Geralt, TW2’s main character. I just can’t believe anyone can achieve this in any other engine than that of TW2.

Skyrim has kind of had zombies since at least about day -2920 (which is coincidentally the name of a book series in TES!), since draugr appeared in Bloodmoon, which heavily implied they would be in Skyrim…

That’s where I am too, somewhere around level 40 when I set it aside. That’s where it reached the “meh” point for me, and it just didn’t seem worth finishing the main plot or leveling higher and doing more quests. Horse combat wasn’t enough to pull me back in.

I might try the DLC if it gets good reviews, since I played my character as a Goody Two Shoes type, and it might be interesting to suddenly flip and go dark side.

I wonder how that affects future DLC though (if there is any), since that seems like something of a dead end for the main character (and the game world) if you take that path.

Man, you would not like Morrowind. A game where you can create a potion that grants you 1000 intelligence for an hour, all the while making you literally fly. Not that you need it, you can one-shot everything once you reach level 20 anyways.

Did you try upping the difficulty though? It also depends on your character, mages have it a lot harder later on.

Totally agree, the crafting was so tempting to spam that I had to force myself not to use it on my second attempt at replaying, couldn’t do it though and ended up godlike too soon and ruining the fun. To be fair it must be next to impossible to balance mid- to late-game given how many character permutations there are at any given level. Levels 1- about 12 feel best to me, then things kind of tail off and I tend to start thinkin about starting again at around level 20ish. Still haven’t seen half of what’s in the game and steam tells me I’m closing in on 200 hours played.

I was expecting anything between a psijic order dlc, something that expands upon the dwemer mystery, something about the deserts in hammerfell, something about the catland.. elswyr or whatever its called, something about the snow-elves.

I could think of a 100 stuff that is worth expanding on in the existing lore and story instead of introducing something completely new and uncalled for.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure this is gonna be epic, it just doesn’t resolve some of the open questions left in the vanilla game which is kinda what i expected the dlc to be.

I kind of want to agree that they should focus on more lore-based issues, but given how they already handled the Psijic Order (a representative of an ancient, mysterious order appears to… send you on a fetch quest and tell you how super special you are), I don’t want to see them try any more. I guess to some extent it was nice to see lore stuff first-hand like the Wolf Queen and Falmer, but it also felt like it made those things mundane, reduced them to just more enemies to hit with a sword, not mythical and fantastical things. It removes all the ambiguity and mystery about them. If they want to make a DLC where you hit things with a sword (and they do because that’s popular and ‘fun’) then I’d rather they do it about something new than reduce an existing element to that.

I guess a game where you’re literally a shouty dragon man who shouts dragons to death isn’t the place to go looking for subtlety and ambiguity. But I wish it was!

They need to figure out something to make playing interesting past maxing the pertinent skills to 100, which happens within 2 days and maybe 10-12 little quests. At which point you ask yourself why even bother when the only progression you have left is trying to guess potion ingredients.

This was already the biggest problem in Oblivion. You finish your character so much earlier than you even remotely progress through the game.

I am a hardcore RPG player and it most certainly didn’t take me 2 days to max out my stats. Maybe it has to do with me doing other things besides playing the game, who knows. OR maybe because I don’t play RPGs to max out my stats.

Well the issue is that there is no lock. Or rather, there is a level-skill lock-step.
Just by casting some enchants for half an hour you level up 10 levels and 30+ skillpoints; just by letting a giant hit you a few times you skyrocket up some levels and skillpoints, and if you are like me and have enough spare dragon parts fairly on and therefore also want the dragon armor, you just make enough daggers to staff out the roman army and then have that at 100, too.

If skills aren’t limited to level progress, or rather when one ups the other, there is no longer the delay of “sure I wish I could have that NOW, but within the game’s progression you still need to play through so and so much(and thus, too, see the world) in order to get to that level, first”.

Not here. Some might laud that, but to me its always just meant dashing for stuff that looked cool to me and then seeing that I was level 50+ just because I wanted some cool perks via high level skills.

The main plot of the TES games has never been that great, but I don’t think that’s the point of the games in the first place. There are literally hundreds of little stories written into the design of the environment, dungeons, and world. You can see them everywhere if you just slow down and look – just because you don’t have some NPC blabbing the backstory at you doesn’t mean they aren’t just as interesting.

Honestly I can’t remember any of it, but Shivering Isles sure was one of the best story I played for a RPG. Bethesda always has this “main” vs “side” stance. Main is straightforward, epic, show off and more or less dull ultimately. Sidequest depends but Dark Brotherhood and Daedra stuff are usually where the unusual wild fun sometime happen. And when it happen, really, it’s sometimes brillant in ways none other than Bethesda do.

Skyrim’s plot in a nutshell: unlikely hero has to trek through a frozen wasteland to destroy a dark lord and his army of dragons. As I say below, the main storylines of Morrowind and Skyrim are quite similar.

I never understood why people found Morrowind’s story so good. It was as generic and predictable as they get. Omigosh, you chosen one, you go smash bad guy with a club, yeeeeey. Like others said before me, TES games have never been about the main story.

@Xardas: This is the thing about Morrowind’s plot. On the one hand, it has barely any plot – you are the chosen one, you unite everyone, you smash some evil guy in a stupid mask. On the other, if you read the books they ask you to get, and think about what you are doing, and listen to Dagoth Ur, and read the Sermons, and pay attention to the fact that much of the mythology of Morrowind is focused around ambiguity, double-sidedness and duplicity, and investigate the Dwemer… it has a lot of plot and none of it is how it looks on the surface. It also borrows a ton of stuff from various cult/religious writings, mostly Crowley’s but also Castaneda and probably others I don’t know about yet, and makes numerous meta-references, so it is not at all just a dumb fantasy “u r teh hero” game.

Seriously I don’t get how someone could look at the Sermons and go “yep this game’s plot is totally on the same level as, like, Dungeon Siege”

I have read absolutely every book in every TES game EVER MADE. I know the Sermons inside and out, and exactly because I have read every book the main story in Skyrim felt just as epic as the one in Morrowind. Because I knew who the World-Eater is, I know what happened when he was around the last time and I also know what is supposed to happen now that he’s back. And dragons disappearing has also been one of the most fascinating mysteries in the TES lore, along with the disappearance of the Dwemer and Falmer.

In its core though, neither of the two games has a great story. Was BioShock’s story still awesome if you didn’t listen to every recording you could find, even though they added depth to it? Yes, it still was. Could we say the same for Morrowind? Not really.

Gamers are so starved for quality (or even average) writing they’ll eat a dirt-covered potato raw and think it’s the best meal ever made just because it isn’t the lutefisk marinated in cat pee that is most other games stories.

Well OK but I think you’re simplifying the thing in your head too much. It wasn’t the chosen one beating up a bad guy because the chosen one probably wasn’t chosen (I don’t think ANYONE in the game truly believed you were the chosen one, and you had no actual special skills except supposedly wearing a ring) and the bad guy wasn’t bad. The way you read the plot of Morrowind is completely missing the point because you’re determinedly taking it on complete face value even though you apparently know there was more to it, and I’m not sure why. I’m not saying it was a masterpiece, but in terms of game stories it kind of was, because it subverted the whole basic plot that you wrongly portay it as being comprised of, and uses the medium well (expects the player to take agency in understanding and uncovering the storyline proper). I think you are probably looking for different ‘good’ qualities in your stories though, since you compare the two plots’ “epicness”, and Morrowind’s real denoument is all about destroying “epicness” (the gods are just guys with some temporary stolen power, you’re one of many ‘chosen ones’, Dagoth Ur goes down without much of a fight…) whereas Skyrim is constantly trying to up the epicness and that felt silly and overblown to me.

And as for the Bioshock thing, it’s not equivalent. The recordings did not actually colour the entire game’s plot – you could see from the surroundings and characters what happened and why, and the main ‘twist’ happened right in front of you and you get beaten over the head with it. Ignoring all the extra bits of Morrowind’s plot is more like reading Animal Farm and deciding to ignore the subtext; it just becomes some kids’ story about animals, but that does not make it a bad story just because you chose to misinterpret it.*

(*disclaimer: not comparing morrowind and animal farm in terms of quality, this should be obvious, please nobody make a douchey comment about how dare I compare them)

What I look for in a story is good dialogue, diverse, deep and interesting characters and a plot that keeps me guessing without becoming convoluted. Morrowind had none of those qualities. I wasn’t talking about epicness really, I was talking more about predictability. The whole thing was done by the book and by any means inferior to Daggerfall.

No offence mate, and I really mean that, but I think you are a bit biased about this. Morrowind was your first TES, no? Now, the MW story did serve its purpose, it would be an outright lie to call it anything less than good. It encouraged you to dig deeper into the lore and get yourself better acquainted with Vvanderfell, its history and culture and to that end it did its job admirably. But I really don’t get people (not necessarily you) who constantly complain about how this TES or that TES doesn’t have the best main plot ever unlike MW, which is TEH SHIT!!!! Meanwhile I look at Morrowind, I look at Planescape: Torment or Arcanum, or Baldur’s Gate, or another CRPG from that era, I look back at MW and say “Whaaaaa..?”

Yes, I did oversimplify things a bit if only to just show that while the story was competent, it was nothing extraordinary or jaw-dropping. It was just… good. It fit in well, that’s about it.

Oh, and the Nerevarine was immune to the Blight. Which, considering the setting, was a pretty big deal.

I must be in a minority of thinking that Daggerfall’s plot was the best. I loved how it tied in a bunch of squabbling nobles in to a “who killed the king?” plot line before going off on a tangent as to choosing which one should have a stupid amount of power. There was a particularly moving part about finding the last words of some scrawny prince in a dungeon who had been kidnapped and dumped there by his own regal parents for being disabled and thus an embarrassment to the family name. Also, going to visit some crazy old bat royal grandmother of so-and-so who lived in some ridiculously remote tower to find out a vital piece of information (she was possibly the former wife of the king who had been murdered).

And, if I remember correct, someone had a PAINTING that showed who killed the king (as a substitute for medieval cameras). Come to think of it, the plot didn’t make much sense but it got me hooked either way.

Don’t see how it’s much different from Skyrim’s. Nerevarine = Dragonborn. Same “chosen one goes and kills big evil baddie” story. In this regard Oblivion was actually different since the player character was NOT the “chosen one.”

My point was that the best stories in the TES games are always the small, subtle ones that flow directly from the world’s design.

Because the Dragonborn has literal, demonstrable worldbending powers that nobody else has except a bunch of ancient hermits and everybody’s constantly reminding you of that, and the Nerevarine was just some guy who managed not to die unlike the last lot of ‘Nerevarines’. I guess you can argue it’s not that different, but a lot of Morrowind’s reasoning around whether you were the Nerevarine at all were political etc, not just “oh shit yeah that guy’s the dragonborn coz he just FUS RO DAH’d me”, so it had more complexity from the start.

I’m hoping the DLC for Skyrim will be interconnected like the DLC for Fallout: New Vegas. Crossbows are neat and all but that “feeding” animation was just terrible. Still, I’m going to reserve judgement until it’s actually out. One should not judge a game on a trailer.

I am going to wait for all the DLC to come out before I purchase any of them. That way I get them cheap, know about all the inevitable bugs, and can plan my mods accordingly. Hopefully one of the DLC will address the bloat factor (you know, using 5 pounds of materials to make a 40 pound breastplate) and the silly “Here, have some XP, and have some more” leveling system for blacksmithing.

I love a good vampire story set in an open world.
And I think I will buy a large expansion that revolves around vampire mythology.
Problem is that Bethesda’s vampires have always been weird and counter intuitive.
But still… I look forward to this.

Yes, vampires are finally getting some proper quests! Morrowind was the last game where becoming a vampire actually unlocked new content beyond a few new powers and a cure quest. Ever since then it’s just been an afterthought included only because they knew people would freak out if it wasn’t included.

And not only are vampires getting some love, but a proper vampire hunting faction and questline? This is day one purchase material. Glad to see Bethesda learned from their horse armor disaster and is sticking to releasing Shivering Isles sized proper expansion packs.

Its nice to see that there is more for being a Vamp now. I`ve always enjoyed Elder Scrolls take and vampirism. Skyrim has a plot, its not awsome but its not horrible either. Yet for me alot of what these games have offered is … meet me and place a, and we will go kill dragons. Ohhh look that that mountain, I want to go climb it… 30 hours later, of enjoying scenery, watching thunderstorms, exlporing random dungeons.

Honestly I made a point in Skyrim to make sure I keep progressing the main story line for for my first character. Simply because in both Morrowwind, and Oblivion, I spent so much time doing side quests. I`ve always enjoyed crafting in games, and simply treking across the world to look for ore, or hacking my ways through dwarven ruins to cart up ever piece of crap to smelt, to me is fun. I`ve put alot of time into alot of different characters, and done alot of different quests. Or true I could try to do everything on one character, and max out my skills to 100, but the imersion I get from Skyrim isn`t from simply grinding to the next level. Heck its one of the main reasons I appreciated the simplyfying the level system, so I don`t have to worry about leveling x,y,z minor skills x times before I level.